Information Overload / Overlord
demonstrating the act of pacification in the era of cognitive overload.
Information Overload/Overlord is an installation that attempts to give physical form to the experience of cognitive overstimulation.
It asks how spaces can embody the effects of information saturation, and what strategies of survival emerge when attention itself becomes exhausted.
The installation was conceived with a prototype developed during a residency program in Texas and later exhibited in Austin (2021) and Dhaka (2023), where I experimented with repeated eye imagery and red thread entanglements on a limited scale.
The scope of the full exhibition is much larger: a gallery fully consumed by hundreds of passive, monochromatic eyes covering walls, floor, and ceiling. Each eye looks without expression, locked in endless reception. Red threads pierce the frames and tangle across the room, their forms unpredictable, evoking both connective tissue and unresolved violence.
"I was beginning to notice a steady shortening of my attention span. I realized it was not a spontaneous phenomenon but a condition produced by living in a constant state of cognitive overload."
The more information I took in, the more overwhelmed and unresolved I felt. As I looked more closely, I found out that this cognitive overstimulation is not an isolated experience, rather a communal one shared by many who regularly access the internet.
In conceiving this work I drew on the idea of “agnotology” (Robert Proctor, 2008) where ignorance can be created not by withholding information but by overwhelming us with it. I investigated how this oversaturation is also a structural condition of capitalism (24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary, 2013) designed to flourish businesses and abolish intervention.
As subjects living in the hyper-fast communication systems of the 21st century, our collective attention spans is frayed. Without pause or consent, streams of information accumulates at the palm of our hands. News of violence, war, genocide and political collapse appears alongside memes, skits, ads and earworms on a daily basis. Everything demands urgency. Everything insists on being seen. "Awareness" now has become compulsory instead of being empowering.
At the deepest corner sits a CRT television, turned toward the wall. The only way to glimpse its screen is through a mirror, from a precise vantage point, and only one person at a time. Unlike the open eyes filling the room, this one shows a closed eye — a quiet refusal, pointing to the intentional ignorance we must sometimes practice to endure the spectacle of endless information.